How I increased my productivity by 200% in 3 weeks

Ashish
Mammoth Stories
Published in
2 min readAug 22, 2014

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I have been unproductive, really unproductive and I never realized that! Its only when I got to know about 2 simple apps and ran a ‘before and after’ test; I found out how bad I was.

I made an effort to fix it and in the past 3 weeks I increased my productivity by ~200%. So how did it?

Read on…

  1. Installed Rescue Time and measured my ‘time’ spent infront of my macbook. Even though I was spending nearly 62 hours in front of it, I was ‘working’ for only 30% of the time. That means ~18 hrs. I was wasting precious time on browsing, emailing, youtube, twitter and what not.
  2. Installed Alinof Timer and set up timer for shorter 40 minute super-focussed work sessions. No Browser, no email, no chat, no notifications!
  3. Put my phone on silent for those 40 mins, no distractions, Only work !
  4. Kept my bottle of water and a plant on the table. Water, so that I don’t have to get up; plant — I don’t know why, they always make me calmer and much more focussed (I think that’s true for most of us).
  5. Next 20 minutes, took a break! Listen to music, watch TV, play with my kid, drink some wine.
current setup

In 3 weeks, from 18 hours, my score went up to 37 productive hrs! Up by roughly 200% !

What’s your score, would you like to change it too?

If you found this post helpful, follow me on Twitter where I tweet about Product Design.

Also make sure to check out Mammoth a collaboration/ productivity tool I’m currently building.

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Ashish
Mammoth Stories

Design, empathy at @mammothhq, previously @microsoft. Tweets @specx www.mammothhq.com